My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress

‘A brilliantly evocative memoir .... beautifully written ... with humour and sorrow.'
Belfast Telegraph

I have never read anything like this book, it's so different to any biographies, especially from Ireland either north or south.

Christina McKenna seems to have had a very unhappy childhood and didn't let this effect her in later life, but rose to the challenge to become a painter first, then a poet and now a writer.

She writes so beautifully, you are taken on a journey back to her childhood in a very imaginative and engrossing way.

She tells about her awful father and his brothers who lacked a spiritual side, but instead of hating them she forgives them, so it's really a very spiritual book and has a message of hope for everybody especially women who might be in a similar unhappy position.

The haunting chapter is amazing, it's hard to believe it happened but you don't doubt it for one moment. Some parts of this book will stay with me for a long time, its message is so very powerful. It is a book that every woman should read.
Review by Marie Flynn on Amazon

For my mother,
Mary McKenna née Henry,
in memoriam,

and
Mr Kiely

T
his existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds. To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky, rushing by like a torrent down a steep mountain.

Gautama Buddha

C
ONTENTS

Acknowledgements

A Glossary of Ulster Scots

Prologue

Honeymoon

Lessons in Heaven

Lessons in Hell

Unhappy Home

Great-aunt Rose and the Goat

Lipstick, Glamour and Death

A Port of Dreams

Bombs and Motorbikes

One Friend, Many Strangers

The Haunting

The Master and The Provo

Leaving the Sunlight for the Gloom

The Big School

The Weird and the Wonderful

Three Days in Purgatory

At War with Colour

John Henry and the Maltese Broad

Facing the Void

Offering it Up

Roll-call of Death

From Fear to Love

About the Author

Copyright Page

A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The following are poems quoted in the text.

The quote on page 216 is from Edmund Spenser (1552-99); that on page 233 is from Anthony Robbins (1960-); the final quote on page 245 is taken from
Salut au Monde
by Walt Whitman (1819-92).

A G
LOSSARY OF
U
LSTER
S
COTS

P
ROLOGUE

I
learned about conflict from my parents. My mother used words as weapons; my father used the angered silence. Within the confines of this senseless arrangement they produced nine of us and gave rise to the fear and insecurity that would dominate most of our lives.

My parents are dead now: all that furious, unfocused energy gone – stilled together in the grave. They surely rest in peace. My mother was in need of a concentrated dose of it. But the anger and resentment and the thwarted logic that fund such emotions is apparent from time to time in my siblings and me; such is the legacy we have been left to grapple with.

This is the story of my journey out of a lonely childhood into the dissonant world of the adult. It's about the mother who cared for me and tried to smooth the way, and the father who couldn't, who charged on ahead regardless, letting the briars and branches of his discontent crash into me, to cause me to stumble, to defeat me and make me bleed.

It's about a few good people who loved me and urged me on. It's about the many who could not love themselves and so held me back, wrecking the pure and present oneness of what I tried to be.

Throughout the journey there was God, bending to fit the cliché of what others said He was. It took a
supernatural event in our home in 1970 to confirm for me the existence of this supreme being. It would also trigger in me the need to question the reality of things rather than blindly accept everything ‘as is'. Finding the truth beneath all the limiting belief systems I grew up with then became my quest.

That search is not an easy one. The fearful past strives to keep me bound, while my higher self calls to set me free. I realise, however, that understanding the people and events of those earlier years, rather than blaming them, is what leads to peace and draws me closer to that truth or the divine spark that lies within all of us. Following this path is a life's work. It involves the continuing education of my heart and soul.

H
ONEYMOON

T
hey were married in April 1946. The wedding photo shows a striking pair. My mother was beauty itself: pale complexion, lovely cobalt eyes and luxuriant, wavy hair that would stay stubbornly black till the day she died. In the picture she stands beside the seated figure of my father. His face is stern and handsome, hers wears a tranquil and knowing smile. This arrangement would be emblematic of their lives together: my mother always on her feet, the worker bee; my father forever the seated, sedentary drone.

Who knows what was going through their heads as they gazed into the lens and out towards their unresolved futures? I sense little affection in this image. They do not link arms or hold hands. They inhabit separate worlds. This then is not a marriage of passion but of need.

The camera shutter shuffles and clicks several times in Keogh Photography Studios off St Stephen's Green. The scene is frozen and framed. They walk out into the bustle of Dublin city in their stiff new clothes and so their married life begins.

After the muted ambience of the studio the city startles anew. The brightness, the noise, and the leaden air. There is a clash of colours and smells: a mix of burnt hops from Guinness's Brewery, the putrid yellowing of a smoke-filled sky and the stench of the Liffey. This stench is the worst. My mother feels unwell and my father is
anxious. He rushes ahead of her down Grafton Street. He does not think to take her hand or ask how she is and, if he does, feels too awkward to put deed to thought. She has difficulty keeping up and collides with a cyclist, making him swear and swerve. Her new shoes show little sympathy for her feet.

She knows that her husband is looking for his older brother Robert, who has been waiting outside Brown Thomas for the photo session to finish. Robert has accompanied them on their honeymoon because he's familiar with the city. My parents have never been to their nearest city Belfast, let alone Dublin. They're like lost children in a maze and are glad of Robert's guiding hand.

When they finally see him amid the crowd they both breathe a sigh of relief. He is easy to spot because he cuts an impressive figure; with his trilby, belted gabardine coat and serious air he resembles a spy left over from the war.

Robert acknowledges the pair with a brief nod and strides ahead. No words are spoken and they are grateful to see that he's heading into Bewley's Oriental Café. Once inside, they form a clumsy trio round a table, and after much hesitation order a cream tea. The air quivers between them. They feel this new experience as a panic rising in them, making the hands unsteady, the words unsure. While all about them conversations ebb and flow, laughter rolls and ripples, fragile cups are raised and lowered, forks sink through pastry, making the china clink and ring. A whole symphony of sound and movement unfolds around them and they feel excluded, ill at ease in the carefree élan of the gathering.

Mother eases off her shoes and sighs. She reaches for a cake and is suddenly conscious of her red, coarsened hands. She's 27 and has been a workhorse for most of
those years. She coughs to cover her embarrassment and looks forward to a better life – a life that will not include the endless scrubbing of shirttails and collars, the drudgery of keeping five brothers presentable. They'll just have to find someone else to skivvy for them, and her mother will have to find someone else to bully.